Yeah, you were thinking the same thing I was thinking--that travel time's not an issue, but time needed to make so damned many appointments is. If government were smaller, there wouldn't need be so much time spent getting people to fill positions.
But, thanks to the Democrats, liberals, and primitives, as government isn't smaller.....
That aside, I never used to think much about this, the long interval between the election and installation of a new president, but then after the elections of 2008 when the primitives were complaining about George Bush still being in the White House, I came around to their point of view; I think it's long past time the Obozos were shown the door and told to get out.
If the primitives don't like my idea, well, they're the ones who first promoted it.
I'm with Carl on the excessive numbers of Cabinet appointments and such, but there's also some more practical, mundane considerations that the public doesn't typically see. There was a news report a couple of weeks back pointing out that there are about
four thousand hiring and firing decisions that have to be made by an incoming President (the news story, predictably, tried to claim that Trump was stupid and couldn't do this himself and therefore needed Obama's help). Things like the White House chef and the White House usher have to be decided, along with stuff like how to furnish the White House and the design of the Oval Office rug (each President gets to choose a new one).
I'm actually quite fascinated with the logistics of the whole matter. There have been a number of documentaries and general-interest news stories about all of this. Believe it or not, the entire transition from one President to another, everything from moving furniture and clothing into the White House to provisioning the kitchen, occurs in just
four hours on Inauguration Day, from about 11:15 (when the President and the President-elect leave the White House together and travel to the actual inauguration) until a little after three o'clock in the afternoon. Imagine! You move somewhere and the movers get
everything done in four hours, right down to unpacking your PJs into your dresser!
Point being that there are a lot of machinations that we mere mortals don't typically see in this stuff. The "transition" itself is a full-time job, well beyond just deciding who is going to be SECDEF and who is going to head the State Department. There's roughly two months between the election and inauguration, which is not really out of line with the expected "transition" time of someone who takes an executive job with a Fortune 500 company in a different city. I'm not really opposed to moving up inauguration day to something closer to January 3, but I'm really pretty fine with the setup as it is right now.